bitterfig

I really feel like my visit to New York threw me off track.  It’s been nearly two weeks since I got back but I still feel very down and ill at ease. 

 

It wasn’t that anything bad or even surprising happened.  Everything went pretty much the way I expected it to.  Every time my mother wanted me to do something, she applied pressure steadily and relentlessly and found ways of making me feel like a bad person for not wanting to whatever it was she wanted me to do.  For instance, she wanted to attend the Schenevus town fair.  I had no desire to go as Schenevus is a half hour drive away and events of this kind are generally populated by creepy The Hills Have Eyes type characters.  So I said I didn’t want to go.   To which Mum replied in a very hurt voice “I thought it would be a fun thing to do.”  “I’d rather not go,” I said.  “It’s such a long drive.”  In an effort to be kind, I didn’t even mention the scary redneck factor.  Instead of just accepting this, Mum said “Just watching other people have a good time is a nice thing to do.” 

 

I did stand my ground with regards to the fair, but I caved in on another matter.  Mum wanted me to call Owlie, a guy I used to be friends who sometimes asks after me.  I really didn’t want to because over the past couple of years, Owlie has gotten deeper and deeper into conspiracy theories to the point where it makes me very uncomfortable.  I’ve told Mum this numerous times.  I’ve even told her he smokes pot (which is just awful in Mum’s world) in an effort to make her lay off but the day I arrived she started on how I ought to call him “just to be polite”. 

 

Instead of saying outright that I didn’t want to, which hasn’t worked in the past, I decided just to ignore her.  However after a couple days she was leaving the phone book lying out and assuring me Owlie probably wasn’t into conspiracy theory any more and not dropping the subject so I finally caved.  The result, a two hour lecture on how Barack Obama is a puppet of the Rockefeller octopus (cuz you know the Rockefeller’s control the Shadow Government) and how 9-11 was actually a planned demolition.  It’s almost like dealing with a born-again Christian.  He literally told me at one point that if I could only accept “the truth” I would be “free”.  It really made me angry.  Not at Owlie, who’s just done too many drugs, but at my mother for refusing to let up on her pressure tactics and with myself for giving in.

 

Also I was really upset by the way my parents interact.  My mother has such contempt for my father.  She treats him like he’s mentally deficient, snaps at him and orders him around.  My father tries to get her attention by saying things he knows will get a reaction- mostly they’re just stupid but sometimes he’ll make really derogatory remarks about ethnic and racial groups or say really hateful things about people we know.  The whole dynamic really disturbs me.  It shouldn’t.  It’s been going on since I was a teenager but I always feel like it’s up to me to smooth things out, appease them both. 

 

I was glad to leave it all behind and yet it’s left an imprint.  Since I got back I’ve felt really depressed and off.  Very lonely and isolated yet at the same time I’ve been completely withdrawn at work, not really able to respond when people try to engage me in conversation.  I talked to my therapist today and she said I needed to try and force myself to keep going to work and interact socially as much as I could.  I started crying because I feel like my whole life has been about forcing myself to do things—finish high school, go to college, make friends, move away from the parents—I’ve forced myself to do all these things and where has it gotten me?  I’m still very much cut off from other people and barely able to earn a living.  It just seems so pointless

 

I hate being like this.  I feel like I have the emotional maturity of a six year old, I get overwhelmed so easily.  

I got back from my visit to my parents yesterday evening and tomorrow I’m back to work.  Today was devoted to reacquainting myself with everyday life, things like going grocery shopping and collecting the Kitty from my sister’s where he stayed while I was away (thankfully he didn’t scratch my niece or nephew). 

 

Upstate New York is breathtakingly beautiful this time of year, fields of wildflowers—tiger lilies, Queen Anne’s lace and blue chicory.  I saw turkeys, deer, hummingbirds, a rose breasted grouse beak and several fat, furry woodchucks, visited my grandmother everyday, went to a fascinating exhibit on Synagogue carvings at the local art museum and read a pile of comic books, mostly back issues of Elfquest and Urusei Yatsura.

 

I can’t say I’m exactly refreshed from my vacation however.  The tension between my parents grated on me like fingernails on a blackboard during the entire visit and perhaps to drown it I sort of created my own internal white noise by drastically cutting down on my daily caloric intake while drinking huge amounts of caffeinated diet soda in addition to sampling some of the prescription grade painkillers Mum had left over from a root canal she had last month (a Hydrocodine tablet and half a Vicodin a couple of days later—I didn’t really get buzzed at all but they did help with the shin splits I had from walking on hilly terrain).  

 

I’m not sure what gets into me when I go back to my parents.  Half of me that strives to be the perfect daughter and the other half works equally hard to be a perfect horror.  Interestingly I got some insight into this watching Batman Unmasked a History Channel special on the psychology of Batman.  It talked about how Batman is a person who is filled with overpowering rage and fear yet is able to master it and how in a way that strength of will is his superpower.  Joker on the other hand is described as seeing the world through a mad kind of logic wherein the existence of injustice cancels out the possibility of justice and where the fact that innocence is corruptible means that no one is innocent.  Sometimes (like this last week) I feel like I contain both these persona and they’re warring it out in every decision I make.  No wonder Batman has always appealed to me so much.

To celebrate their 40th Anniversary The Museum of Contemporary Art is waiving admission for 40 days between September 29 and November 14.  There’s an exhibit going on right now called Sympathy for the Devil: Art and Rock and Roll Since 1967 that I’ve been wanting get to and since I wasn’t working either of my jobs yesterday I decided to go see it while it was still free. 

 

I have to admit I’m a bit of a Philistine when it comes to Contemporary Art.  To me, about 90% of it seems like a con.  In fact my favorite Contemporary Artists are the ones like Jeff Koons and Andy Warhol who sort of acknowledge that they’re hacks.  Still, amidst the usual meaninglessly esoteric video and installation pieces there was some genuinely neat stuff in the show. 

 

My favorite pieces were in the area dedicated to artists/musicians from the Detroit area (the show was sort of divvied by geography—New York, L.A., Europe, Detroit, etc).  The Destroy All Monsters Collective, which is both a noise rock band and a group of artists made up of Mike Kelley (probably best known for the cover of the Sonic Youth album Dirty), Carey Loren and Jim Shaw (pop noir artist Niagara is also affiliated) had series of paintings modeled on sideshow banners and civic pride murals depicting the Detroit’s pop culture icons from White Panther leader John Sinclair to James Brown to Soup Sales to George “The Animal” Steele and Iggy Pop.

 

I also was intrigued by a video installation titled “The Spirit Girls: A Western Song” by Marnie Weber.   It was a film of about 24 minutes that followed a group of white faced women in 19^th century gingham dresses and straw hats who moved through a surreal and theatrical countryside and an old west type town.  The imagery was deeply seeped in Americana— farm animals, hobos, a Barnum and Bailey style circus, musicians playing the banjo and the saw.  According to the blurb outside the instillation, “The Spirit Girls” was about an imaginary all-female band whose members all died at the same time and was also inspired by the 19^th century Spiritualist movement. 

 

This really struck a chord with me as I spent many years obsessively collecting the recordings of all-female and female dominated bands in all musical genres and also because it gave me some ideas of what I want to be doing with my writing.  I’ve resolved to return to original writing and I’m interested in writing about the area I come from, the strange sense I’ve always had that a history of prosperity and significance existed simultaneously with a desolate present. 

 

Because of my parent’s interest in history and my own reading, I was always aware that the fallen down places along the roads once meant something, that the rickety old people they dragged us to see came from families that had at one time had mattered.  When I was growing up the past always seemed more important than the present

 

My parents were interested in agricultural history and the daily lives of ordinary people in the 19^th century, especially involving the hops trade in our area.  The areas of history that attracted me were of a different kind.  I paid attention when Edith Wharton mentioned familiar places in her novels like the train station in Utica or the seedy village of Richfield Springs which had apparently once been a summer destination for smart New Yorkers.  I was also fascinated by the idea that the very narrow-minded world I inhabited for so long had once been teeming with religious radicals.  It was in Upstate New York that Joseph Smith supposedly found the golden tablets on which the book of Mormon was written.  Of course that was outside Rochester, a couple of hours away.  Closer to home Ann Lee founded the Shakers, a sect that practiced celibacy but who would dance with abandon in services that sound almost like voodoo rituals and be processed by the spirits of Indians.  Then there was the Oneida colony, a utopian community founded before the Civil War that communal society that practiced a form of “complex” or group marriage. 

 

In the 1960’s where was a similar influx of radical ideas into the area but by the time I came along it had more or less dwindled into a few strange recluses raising sheep in the hills around Cherry Valley.

 

It’s a landscape I’ve always wanted to capture in fiction though I haven’t tried since I got away from it.  In a way “The Spirit Girls” was almost like a glimpse of the kind of thing I’d like to do, except with an actual narrative.

The Spirit Girls